Magazine

Graeme Patterson’s Strange Birds 

The highlight of Strange Birds was the virtual reality room. Set up in the media gallery, VR “Island” transported visitors into the world of the starlings and the heron, which enabled a more interpersonal relationship with the protagonists. I feared that the virtual reality component would detract from the narrative’s ethos, as this sort of technology has proven distractingly theatrical and forced in my past experiences. But with the already introduced and pre-existing world of Strange Birds, Patterson’s use of VR channels the spirit of the exhibition and facilitates an immersive yet appropriate viewing experience. The artist also considered accessibility; if guests were not comfortable with virtual reality or were eagerly waiting to try it out, a clever inclusion of a montage containing key aspects of VR “Island” was projected in the adjacent room. VR “Island” also brought viewers back to the gallery’s entrance, where they could revisit the pivotal Strange Birds short film. 

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Alan Syliboy’s The Journey So Far

Mi’kmaw artist Alan Syliboy’s retrospective The Journey So Far, curated by Pamela Edmonds at the Dalhousie Art Gallery (May 9 to August 11, 2024), spanned more than fifty years of work. The exhibition included paintings, collage, photography, music, print, mixed media, video, drums, and guitars and even a commissioned wall mural featuring a great horned...

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Eastern Edge Moose Sign (designed by Ray Mackie

Eastern Edge: 40 Years of Art and Dancing on the Edge of the North Atlantic 

This summer marked the fortieth anniversary of Eastern Edge Gallery, Newfoundland’s only artist-run centre and the site of some of the wildest and most boldly political art exhibited in Newfoundland since the early 1980s. In preparation for celebrations, which took place in St. John’s in August, the gallery staff dug into their archives, hosted story-sharing...

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Keel William Robinson 2023 Grand piano top 213.4 x 157.5 x 53.3 cm (84 x 62 x 21 in) Image courtesy of the artist Photo by Meghan Tansey Whitton

Pitchpole

If the church is a display of God’s glory, Pitchpole is a display of conceptual art’s glory. Poetry by Erin Langille (acting as a psalm), Pitchpole (the hymn), jewellery by Shaya Ishaq (the relic), a sturdy set of speakers (the organ), and Ader (the saint). Does it matter that we don’t know the story of Ader and his ill-fated journey, or the many legends that have surrounded him since? Or is Ader's story simply Robinson’s invitation to work through whatever unfinished grief we hold in the cathedral of the contemporary art gallery?

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Mountains of Wonder and A view of three walls in the gallery with multiple works in view from a distance. Part of the exhibition Tangles of Truth: Kathy Hooper, a Retrospective at the Saint John Arts Centre.

Kathy Hooper’s Mountains of Wonder and Tangles of Truth

Hooper writes, “I walked out of my studio one day and was overwhelmed by the complexity of it all.” This complexity is what she investigates through her drawings, be it the complexity of a landscape, a human being, an idea, or the world at large. This process is further illustrated through the inclusion in the exhibition of many of her rough drafts and sketchbooks. Flipping through these jumbles of drawing and poetry, sketches and snippets of prose, one can imagine Hooper sitting at her desk in her studio, creating on the fly.

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Séamus Gallagher’s Candy-Coated Universe

“What I find inspiring is looking at my many different interests and finding ways of linking them together and creating, like, a mapping of my interests, and threading disparate sources of inspiration, and then creating projects out of those inspirations,” Gallagher says. 

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REBECCA FISK: THERE IS NO ONE STORY OF BLACK GIRLHOOD

There Is No One Story of Black Girlhood is a powerful and unyielding exhibition of Rebecca Fisk’s series of self-portrait paintings. As an African Nova Scotian artist based in Mahone Bay, Fisk’s acrylic paintings reveal what may lurk beneath the dominant culture of Nova Scotia’s mask of politeness. Her work alludes to the sinister insincerity...

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‘L’NU/ BEAUTIFUL’: JERRY EVANS’S RETROSPECTIVE WELJESI 

Since October 2022, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery has consecutively presented solo exhibitions in their gallery spaces by Mi’kmaq artists from Ktaqmkuk, specifically highlighting the artistic practices of Kelsey Street, Nelson White, and Alex Antle. Weljesi, the most recent exhibition to unfold in the fourth level art gallery, celebrates Mi’kmaw and settler artist Jerry Evans...

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ALANNA BAIRD’S UNFAMILIAR SEAS

Alanna Baird’s artwork infiltrates the New Brunswick vernacular, while also sparking important conversations around marine ecology in this time of climate crisis. As a longtime inhabitant of the small coastal community of St. Andrews, NB, Baird has closely observed the changing shoreline beyond her home. She maintains a dedicated ritual of engagement with the liminal,...

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Alex Antle’s Njikam (My Younger Brother)

Embedded within a matrix of dark stone on the second-floor landing gallery at The Rooms is the vivid and materially diverse exhibition Njikam (My Younger Brother) by emerging L’nu artist Alex Antle. Originally from Qapskuk (Grand Falls-Windsor), Antle is currently based in Elmastukwek (Bay of Islands) where her maternal Mi’kmaw ancestors are from, and where...

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Ji Hyang Ryu’s Culture Bridge

Ji Hyang Ryu has a warm and excitable personality that is reflected in her studio space in Riverview, New Brunswick. She welcomes me into a room resplendent with plants, books, and used canvases. She makes us coffee and begins sharing her story of what brought her from South Korea to Canada. Ryu has been interested...

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Tropical Gothic

Tropical Gothic is an exhibition curated by Excel Garay and Liuba González de Armas at the Khyber Center for the Arts (January 31 – February 11, 2023), which features the works of Cinthia Arias Auz, Kayza DeGraff-Ford, Carmel Farahbakhsh, Shaya Ishaq, Pamela Juarez, Marissa Sean Cruz, and Excel Garay. The group exhibition draws inspiration from...

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